It appeared way back in the September 8 issue of the TLS, but I’ve only just read the review by Jerry A Coyne of Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise. Coyne applauds Crews’s skewering of contemporary fallacies–“not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb […]
Dirty Realism is the term critics use to describe the writings of Marek Nowakowski. He writes about people “on the margins” — drunkards, pimps, criminals, cat torturers, anal rapists and so on — Polish writers seemingly unable to discern the vast mass of people that lie in between the intelligentsia and the dregs. One collection […]
The canniest political elites are able to lull their subjects into experiencing what George Orwell dubbed doublethink: “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” In the contemporary political scene, a passive electorate is expected to swallow a) that the government, being a success, is naturally supported […]
Traktat o ?uskaniu fasoli (Treatise on shelling beans) is the title of Wies?aw My?liwski’s latest book. It takes that most self-indulgence-prone form of a monologue (delivered to a stranger). In one passage from the essay — errr, novel — the narrator describes an incident from his childhood. Children can be so cruel some times, and […]
How would the Sunday newspapers fill their proliferating pages if teams of university researchers did not dutifully supply them with nuggets of trivia? For instance, this weekend the Sunday Times reported that: Street names are a key indicator of social class and thus personal wealth, according to new research by Professor Richard Webber, of University […]
A soap maker named Unilever is trying to start a debate about beauty in Poland. The back page of this weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza is entirely given over to an advertis– sorry, a manifesto about “real beauty.” (Fair play to GW: it is clearly marked advertisement.) Straight away there is something suspiciously close to a tautology: […]
I suppose it is only fitting in this, the centenary year of Samuel Beckett’s birth, that Poland take the last (?) few decisive steps to total absurdity. A Polish friend asked me last night if I had heard that Giertych wanted to stop the teaching of Darwinism in schools. Huh? Then I remembered: no that’s […]
It’s a good thing I’m not a proper book reviewer, editor, or proof reader or anything. I would be unbearable. Reading Reisefieber by Miko?aj ?ozi?ski, for instance, I keep running into annoying lapses. Who the hell cares if the narrator (when working as a journalist) takes his lunch break at two in the afternoon? I […]
“Then, thus I turn me from my country’s light/To dwell in solemn shades of endless night.” Thus spake Shakespeare’s Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, when faced with exile from the land of his birth. But that was in Ye Olden Dayes. In contrast, the modern Irish exile finds cosseted refuge in countries where endless sun […]